People
see you under thousand different aspects. For centuries, artists have been
representing you sometimes with a sitar, or with the sling as opposing to
Goliat, or with the sceptre on the throne, or in the grotto of Engaddi, at the moment
of cutting Saul' s mantle.

Boys admire the fight you had with Goliat and your enterprises as a brave and
generous leader.

Liturgy remembers
you, mainly, as Christ' s ancestor.

The
Bible introduces the different components of your personality: poet and musician;
brilliant captain; prudent king,
implied - oh, not always happily - in women affaires and in harem intrigues with the consequent
family tragedies; and, however, friend of God thanks
to the distinguished mercy that kept you always conscious of your smallness
before God.

This
last characteristic is particularly likeable for me and it cheers me when I find
it, for example, in the brief psalm 130, written by you.

You
say in that psalm: Lord, my
heart does not become arrogant. I try to follow your step, but, unfortunately,
I have to be limited to request: Lord, I wish that my heart does not run after
thoughts of proud...!

Too
much little for a Bishop, you will say. I understand it, but the truth
is that one hundred times I have celebrated the funerals of my pride, thinking
on having buried it two meters under the ground with so much requiescat, and
one hundred times I have seen it rise again more awakened than before: I have
realized that I still disliked critics, that praises, on
the contrary, flattered me, that I was worried about the others opinion on me.

When
they make me a compliment, I need to be compared with the donkey that led Christ the day of the
Palms. And I tell myself: How would they have laughed at the donkey if, when listening
to the crowd applause, it had become arrogant and had begun - ass like it was -
thanking right, left and centre with reverences as a primadonna !
Don' t make a fool of yourself like that...!

However,
when critics arrive, I need to put me in the situation of Br. Cristoforo of Manzoni
who, when he was target of ironies and mockeries, keeps calm by saying to
himself: "Brother, remember you are not here for yourself"

The
same Br. Cristoforo, in another context, "going two steps back, putting the
right hand over the hip, he raises the left one with the forefinger pointing at Don
Rodrigo". And he stares at him with inflamed eyes. This
gesture pleases very much to Christians of nowadays, who demand "prophecies", clamorous
accusation, "inflamed eyes", "fulminating lightings", Napoleon'
s style.

I like
much more the way you write, king David: "my eyes have not been
altered". I would like to be able to feel like Francis of Sales when he
wrote: "If an enemy removed my right eye, I would smile him
with the left one; if he took me out both eyes, I still would have kept my heart to love
him".

Your
psalm continues: "I am running neither in search of great things nor in too much
high things for me". Very noble position if it is compared
with which Don Abbondio said: "Men are like this: they always wish to
ascend,
always to ascend". Unfortunately, I am afraid Don Abbondio was right: we
tend to reach to those who are above us, to push our equal ones downwards,
and to sink still more those who are underneath.

And
we? We tend to excel, to rise by means of honours, promotions and
appointments. It is not wrong if it is a healthy emulation, moderate and
reasonable wishes, that stimulate work and research.

But
if it becomes a kind of disease? What happens if, to go ahead, we trample on others by means of
injustice and defamation? If, always to progress, we are
gathered in "flocks", with the thinnest pretexts, but in fact to
close the passage to other "flocks", provided even with more "advanced" appetites?

And
then, for which satisfactions? One is the impression positions cause from
the distance, before being obtained, and another one is what they produce closely, after having been obtained. It was very well said by one who was crazier than
you, but also poet like you: Jacopone of Todi. When he heard his brother Pier of
Morone had been elected as a Pope, he wrote:

What are
you
going to doPier
of
Morone...?

If
you do not know howto
defend
yourself well

you
will sing a bad song !

I
often say to me in the middle of the worries of the episcopal ministry:
"Now, dear, you are singing the bad song of Jacopone!" You also said it in psalm 51 "against
evil tongues". Those,
according to your opinion, are "like sharpened knives" that,
instead of beard, they cut the good reputation.

Well.
But, once the knife is used, just a short time later, the beard begins growing spontaneous and
flowery. Also the honour humiliated and the fame broken into pieces grow again.
That' s why sometimes it is prudent to shut up, to be patient:
opportunely everything comes spontaneously back to its place!

***

To
be optimist, in spite of everything. It is this what you mean when writing:
"Like boy of breast in his mother' s arms..., like this inside me it is my
soul". The confidence in God must be the axis of our thoughts and our
actions.
Although we look at it, in fact, the main personages of our life are two: God
and us.

Looking
at
these two, we will always see goodness in God and misery in us. We will see the
divine goodness well ready towards our misery, and to our misery like an object of
the divine goodness. The judgments of men remain a little out of the game: they
can cure neither a guilty conscience nor hurt a right conscience.

Your
optimism, at the end of the little psalm, explodes in a shout of joy: I put myself
in Lord's hands, since now and for ever. When I read you, you certainly do not seem
a scared one for me, but a brave one, a strong man, who empties his soul from confidence in
himself to fill it with the confidence and the power of God.

Humility,
in other words, runs together with magnanimity. To be good is something great and
beautiful, but difficult and arduous. So that the spirit does not
aspire to great things of an excessive size, here it is humility. So that it is
not become frightened before difficulties, here it is magnanimity.

I
think about Saint Paul: scorns, lashes, pressures, do not get depressed this
magnanimous one; ecstasies, revelations, applauses do not raise this humble one.
Humble when he writes: "I am the smallest of the apostles". Magnanimous
and ready to face any risk when he declares: "All I can in who comforts me". Humble, but
when it is the moment and the place he knows how to fight: "Are they Jewish?
So I am... Are they ministers of Christ? I say madnesses, more I
am that". He puts himself below everybody, but in his obligations he does not let
himself fold by anything or by anybody.

The
waves throw the ship in which he travels against the
reefs; the snakes
bite him; pagans, Jews, false Christians expel and persecute him; he is whipped
with twigs and thrown to the jail, it is made him die every day, they think they
have frightened him, annihilated, and he returns to appear fresh and full of
vigour to assure us: "I am convinced that neither death nor life..., neither
the present nor the future, neither the height nor the depth, no
other creature, will be able to separate me from the love of God that is in
Christ Jesus".

It
is the exit door of Christian humility. This does not end at the pusillanimity, but at the
courage, at the enterprising work and at the abandonment in God!

February
1972

*
DAVID
,
King of Israel from approximately 1010 a.C. The Bible presents the different
faces of his personality: musician and poet; brilliant soldier, prudent king, implied in women
affaires and, nevertheless,
friend of God and model of sincere repentance, thanks to the
distinguished mercy
that kept him conscious of his smallness.